Squiddles

There’s something called “Brook’s Law” that basically observes that a software project which onboards more developers in order to catch up will fall further behind. I hope they’re careful about how they allocate new developers or they’ll end up doing a year of onboarding, rewriting core code, and have no meaningful updates for 6-12 months. I know they have the resources to spare, and that scenario worked out okay for Valheim, but I hope the game doesn’t lose momentum because they overhire or don’t allocate enough senior devs to continue feature development while they catch the new devs up to speed.

Edit to add: I don’t think it actually matters in this instance if they don’t have a large player base by the time the game is feature complete. They don’t have continuous revenue streams like a live service game, so hiring more devs is ultimately just about making sure they have enough talent to make good on their early access promises. The company could probably dissolve tomorrow and all the staff could live the rest of their lives in luxury never working again. It’d be a dick move, but they already sold an insane number of copies.

Definitely second Dyson Sphere Program! I’m not at all interested in the combat (it’s optional), but now that they have that completed they’ll be updating other features too. I’m hundreds of hours in and still come back to it.

I just ran a quick check and private games (whether installed or not) are still shared. Seems like a weird oversight.

Lots of possible uses for private games, beyond the obvious. Off the top of my head: when working on mods I’ll relaunch a game dozens of times and Steam will spam the in-game notification to my friends unless I sign out of chat. Now I can stay in chat and just make the game private until I’m done modding. Some games get left open a lot (like idle games) and I don’t want them cluttering my profile’s recent games. Sometimes I just want a dumb-fun game without advertising it to friends because I’m self-conscious about it. Some people have coworkers as friends on Steam so they can play socially, but some games may give away political/personal information that they would rather keep private (eg, LGBTQ+ focused games). I have young family members who are friends on Steam and I’d rather they don’t see certain games in my library.

I wish it was implemented like an access control list instead of just private or not-private, but being able to keep the games I want to play with others public and keep other games private is absolutely brilliant. Now I can take private mode off, which makes figuring out which game to play with friends much easier since they can see my library and the “what games do we both have” library filter will work.

Broadly, I agree with what you’re saying. Totally just devil’s advocate-ing and speculating to provoke thought, so feel free to ignore. I wonder if the enormous number of games available plays into this. I can almost always dig around and find at least one 10/10 game from the last couple of years that I haven’t played which is already on sale for cheap. Comparing that to a 7/10 game that just came out at full price… I’d almost certainly enjoy the 7/10 game, but I’d spend less money and likely have more fun with the 10/10. The newness factor may not be enough to bump the 7/10 game to the top of the queue.

With so many great games available an 8/10 might actually feel like a logical minimum for a lot of people, which may influence the scale that reviewers use. If people tend to ignore games with 7- scores and a reviewer feels that a game is good enough that it deserves attention, they may be tempted to bump it up to 8/10 just to get it on radars.

Meanwhile, back in the day there wasn’t such a glut of games to choose from. And with better QoL standards, common UX principles, code samples, and tools/engines, games may legitimately just be better on average than they used to be, making it fiddly to try to retrofit review scores onto the same bell curve as older games. To reverse it, I can see how an 8/10 game released in 1995 might be scored significantly worse by modern reviewers for lack of QoL/UX features, controls, presentation style, etc, or even just be scored lower because in modern times it would lack the novelty it had at the time it was released.